The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood (Jonathan Cape Ltd 1986)
- Edward Nightingale
- Dec 3, 2016
- 2 min read
The Republic of Gilead, said Aunt Lydia, knows no bounds. Gilead is within you.
This dystopian novel’s first person narrator, Offred, is a paradox. She’s the Handmaid of the title but, as the reader eventually discovers, her ‘tale’ is and is not her own. And as a Handmaid in the twisted theocracy of Gilead, she is both revered and oppressed. Moreover, as our unreliable narrator she frequently plays – sometimes deliberately, sometimes not – with our trust; and yet the more she tells us she can’t be trusted, the more we trust her. For example, she’ll tell us what she thinks and then say ‘In fact I don’t think about anything of the kind. I put it in only afterwards.’ And this honesty about her dishonesty makes us take her word for things, even – or especially – when she warns us not to. It’s a clever trick by Atwood, to conjure credibility from this kind of narrative dishonesty, and it works well. On a theoretical level Atwood may be exploring the nature of authority (also as in author-ity) through an unreliable narrator, an autocratic regime and the revelatory ‘Historical Notes’ section at the end. A question that persists until this final section is ‘How is Offred telling this story?’ She frequently describes her activity in the present tense – clearly a narrative device – but we also know that in Gilead Handmaids are not allowed to read and write. So how is it we are reading her ‘tale’? But on we go.
Part of the novel’s success is due to Offred’s skill with language. She loves words and plays with them (sometimes literally) all the time. Because reading and writing are forbidden to her, thinking about words – their meanings, sounds, relationships and connotations – becomes a satisfyingly subversive act. ‘I sit in the chair and think about the word chair. It can also mean the leader of a meeting…a mode of execution…the first syllable in charity…the French word for flesh.’ Doing this with words is also how she attempts to preserve her sanity and memory. And words, after all, are what she is made of: ‘I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose.’
The other part of the novel’s success is due to Gilead itself, or the view we get of it from our insider/outsider narrator. Atwood has claimed there is nothing in Gilead that hasn’t happened somewhere in the world at some point in history; and when you think of it like that, the horrors of her dystopia become all the more disquieting. Gilead fuses typical features of the genre – propaganda, fallout, executions, surveillance and technology – with concerns of the modern (1980s) permissive society: pornography, gender inequality, ‘hate speech’ and religious fundamentalism. And what is even more unsettling is that the nastier elements of Gilead – police brutality, curbs on free speech, rules on clothing – seem to be in the news again each time I reread the novel. ‘Whatever is going on is as usual,’ as Offred warns.
And a word about the final ‘Historical Notes’ section: it changes everything. Or does it?
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